The Mumbai-based Navneet Publications (India) Ltd, a dominant player in education and office stationery products, has entered the bricks-and-mortar education segment under the brand name Leapbridge. Navneet Publications launched its first Leapbridge International pre-schools located at Kalyani Nagar, Mumbai and Aundh, a suburb of Pune, on December 7. Leapbridge pre-schools offer curriculums based on multiple intelligences principles formulated by Dr. Howard Gardner. Navneet plans to promote 350 pre-schools in India over the next five years.
Speaking on the occasion Ketan Gala, vice president international business of Navneet Publications and the founder-director of Leapbridge observed: “Navneet always brings best quality products and services as we believe in promoting the all-round development of children. Therefore Leapbridge institutions will offer the world’s best tried and tested pedagogies delivered by highly trained teachers.”
Classes at the Leapbridge International pre-schools commenced in January with pre-nursery and nursery programmes. The kindergarten programmes will begin in June.
MDI-Indian Oil concordat
The Delhi-based Management Development Institute (MDI), one of India’s premier B-schools, inked a memorandum of understanding with the Indian Oil Corporation Ltd (IOC) to collaborate in training and development. The MoU was signed by Dr. B.S. Sahay, director of MDI and V.C. Agrawal, director (human resources) of IOC in Mumbai on January 27.
The agreement envisages utilising the intellectual resources and infrastructure of MDI to facilitate IOC in its various areas of talent and organisation development. Some of the areas identified are: (i) management development programmes for competency development at the board level, directors’ programmes, advanced management programmes for leadership development, senior and middle level management programmes; (ii) MDI faculty to provide expertise to IOC in dealing with various challenges faced by it in the form of consultancy projects; (iii) IOC to nominate its executives for long duration educational programmes like FPM, executive MBA; (iv) Jointly work in the areas of research, conferences on topical themes, case studies and case competitions; and (v) IOC to participate in placements for employing graduate students and provide summer interships to MDI students.
Confluence 2009 staged in Guwahati
Sanskriti, The Gurukul (STG, estb. 2003), Guwahati staged its biannual festival Confluence 2009 — a kaleidoscope of art, culture and academics on December 17. The theme of Confluence 2009 was the ‘The North-East’. During the one-day festival every department, society and /or club in the school presented a model or tableau representing cultural practices and lifestyles of people in the seven sister states of north-east India.
“Students were divided into several groups or departments. While the English and Hindi departments delineated the poets and writers of the north-east, students staged their plays and skits. Likewise students in the cultural department presented dances of the seven sister states, while the science department presented displays on green fuel. The geography department converted the basketball court into a large physical map of the north-east with states and important locations marked out,” says Ashutosh Agarwal, founder secretary of STG.
Confluence 2009 was inaugurated with great fanfare by Dr. Kiran Bedi, the first woman to join the Indian Police Service and former director general of the Bureau of Police Research & Development.
Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace
Unesco’s newly appointed first woman director general, Irina Bokova paid a five-day visit to India between January 9-14 and discussed the establishment of the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development, Unesco’s first Category I institute in India. “Unesco is a lab of ideas and will play an important role in new humanism of the 21st century,” she said in Delhi.
Moreover on the eve of the release of Unesco’s EFA (Education For All) Global Monitoring Report in New York on January 19, Bokova called for a determined effort to educate women and girl children. “In countries making progress towards EFA, Unesco will target those still excluded from education with special emphasis on women and girls. All possible venues for South-south cooperation in the area of education, including exchange of good practices, should be explored and I shall encourage such efforts,” she added.
CodeChef Campus winners China bound
Directi (estb. 1998), a $300 million (rs.1,380 crore) corporate enterprise which develops innovative mass market web products serving millions of customers worldwide, concluded the finals of a national competition named ‘CodeChef Campus SnackDown’ in Mumbai on January 10. Directi has consistently been rated among the fastest growing companies of Asia by Deloitte and Touche.
CodeChef is India’s first non-commercial, multi-platform online coding competition, featuring monthly contests in more than 35 different programming languages. Winners of each contest get prizes, peer recognition and an invitation to compete at the CodeChef Cup, a live event held annually. According to Directi spokespersons, the competition serves as a platform for practice, competition and improvement for computer programmers. The competition is also open to students of leading B-schools in India and is aimed at challenging the intellectual and strategic abilities of future business leaders of India.
This year the top three winning teams in the CodeChef SnacksDown were: Team ‘Dream’ from IIIT-Hyderabad; team ‘Phoenix’ from the D.J. Sanghvi College of Engineering, Mumbai and team ‘CounterGambit’ from NIT, Trichy.
The teams of the three colleges will represent India at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) in Harbin, China, from February 1-6, hosted by Harbin Engineering University. The three India teams are among 22,000 contestants from 1,931 universities in 82 countries competing this year.